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First Person The Collapsible Infant Seat Let me tell a story on my friend Ignatius. It's been 15 years, after all, and I've altered his name beyond recognition in case he's trying to forget. He saw it displayed in the window of an antique store: an old, table-mounted folding infant seat made of oak. It looked like something out of H.G. Wells-a Victorian cockpit seat for a half-scale wooden moon rocket. It clamped-most ingeniously-by weight alone to a table edge; no legs down to the floor were needed. Ignatius' wife was expecting their first child. He bought it on the spot. His bride took one look and sputtered loud vetoes. " furthermore, never," was the gist of her end of the discussion. Perhaps it was asking too much of her, he thought, to put her 0, and faith in a wooden infant seat without so much as a test. Because the antique seat had been built long before Underwriters Laboratories began testing buggy whips, it was Iggy's duty to test it. Fortunately, a test subject of the right size and weight wandered into his shop. As cats went, Bilbo was a plump but dignified family companion feline. After Iggy clamped the seat on the workbench, he installed Bilbo in the hanging seat. The chair held, even as the fretting feline multiplied his feet by a factor of 10 and, finally, escaped. Iggy attempted to mount the chair on the kitchen table and, thereby, found a big hitch: The seat would fit at the head of the table, but not on the side because the bottom suppOlting anTIS hit the apron. "Well, that won't work," said a relieved mother-to-be. "We can't put our baby at the head of the table." Iggy inquired why the heck not. The head of the table was the perfect place for the seat. "No, Ignatius," she replied, "when that ancient, fragile contraption buckles or turns to dust, we'll have to leap around the table." Contraption? Iggy thought, returning downstairs to mull and contemplate. He saw it as a beautiful piece of antique furniture; his wife saw only an ancient and dangerous gizmo. It was clear that heroic doses of logic were lost on her. But a good woodworker never gives up. Ignatius had one remaining chance to win her confidence. He would build a brand new identical copy of the infant seat out of the strongest wood he could find. Some extra biographical data on Ignatius: Though a skilled woodworker, the operation of moving pans boggled him. The ability to visualize dynamic spatial relationships is a gift, not a skill, and one Iggy did not have. The chair had no fewer than 10 moving parts, supremely complicated. Nevenheless, Ignatius disassembled it and made duplicates of every part. Then he tried to put them together, and failed. 122 Fine Woodworking He examined, measured, panially assembled and completely disassembled both seats a dozen times. He'd often get as many as nine pans together, but find no way to wedge the tenth one in. He began to dream about odd and Escher-like ways of putting them together. It was no longer just a child seat, but a problem in dynamic, trapezoidal topology, a hellish calculus executed in Tinkenoys. Eventually, after weeks of prayer and fasting, he assembled the replicated seat. The child was born, a healthy 8-lb. boy, and Iggy proudly produced his new antique infant seat. His wife saw only a new basket of the same old cobras, into which her idiotic co-parent wanted to drop their firstborn. But when he demonstrated the chair, by means of Bilbo the Reluctant Infant Surrogate, and the contraption failed to explode immediately, her "No way" became "Maybe I'll think about it." Months passed. The day came when Iggy decided that his son was about the right size to eat solid food at the table: Thanksgiving. His whole family, nuclear, extended and in-laws gathered for supper, heads bowed. And there was little Iggy Jr., suspended at the end of the table in his antique folding infant seat, proudly smearing mashed potatoes into his face. It was a scene of much harmony and tranquillity. There is much to be said for the beauty of old child-dining inventions made of wood. By contrast, today's modern child seat is a fairly ugly piece of plastic and aluminum, and it won't even fold. But by golly, it's been tested and approved. It will not fail after 10 minutes of operation, in the middle of a Thanksgiving dinner, its arms suddenly buckling. It will not venically delete one's only male heir from the table and cause relatives to leap over the table, the turkey and the gravy, to save him. Modern high chairs just don't do tl1at. Iggy Jr. landed safe but shaken on the soft body of Bilbo the Feline Fallbreaker who was eating turkey crumbs under the chair. All returned to the table to finish the meal-all except the antique folding infant seat, which spent the evening out-of-doors. Shoniy thereafter, I bought a lot of Ignatius' woodworking tools. At his wife's suggestion, he was getting out of furniture design. Jeff Taylor is the author of Tools of the Trade: The of Carpentry, Chronicle Books (1996). Art and Craft